To start is often one of the most difficult steps in a project. But imagine you are together with some open and creative colleagues, having the same goal in mind and being able to talk about all your ideas. That was exactly the impression I had at the first MINE project meeting in mainz. Thanks to all colleagues, i think we had a great and very fruitful time and also a great start into our project. You know, sometimes you sit in a meeting and you feel that it´s just perfect, that everything somehow works very well, one topics smoothly comes to the next one and at the end of the day you look at your preparations and you see, that all topics you wanted to talk about were discussed.

But let´s talk a little about the project. The topic is about mobile learning in higher education. As we all know, mobile technologies are a part of our life, a part of our society. Those tools are already widely used in in various learning settings, but not much used in higher education. When i talk about mobile learning, i don´t mean special apps, certain OS or devices. I have a more general approach about mobile learning, i mean that the learner can access the content whenever and wherever he wants. Mobile learning is also based on open learning resources, so for that we also need various OER which is accessible via mobile devices. People are much more mobile these days and as we are connected to the internet most of the time, we are also connected into our social network, to our learning network and also to our personal learning environment. Mobile technologies opens also the possibility for the learner, to take more control of the own learning process. That means that the role of the learning and also of the teacher will change. The learner must be much more self aware of his own learning process, being able to organize himself and the role of the teacher will change that he will be more a guide, a facilitator. To make this possible, the “learner” and the “teacher” needs certain competences which are rather seldom in traditional formal education institutions. But they are the important base to enable self organized learning with mobile technologies. That´s the reason why this project will collect those basic competences for mobile learning in a first step and then we will develop together a small curriculum for a students and a teacher course. To see if those courses are practical and useful the way we thought, we will put them in practice in an Intensive Programm in spring 2018. After the evaluation of this first course, we will also try to improve our curriculum based on the feedback and the evaluation of the IP. At the end we wonna run those courses in all participating instutions, mainly as an online course with the intensive use of mobile learning.

You got interested? You wonna know more about it or you wonna join the team? We would be very happy to hear from you, check out the contact details and we will get in touch.